Democracy is the solution

Damian Thompson reviews Celsius 7/7 by Michael Gove and Dying to Win by Robert A Pape.

By Damian Thompson

12:01AM BST 13 Aug 2006

Damian Thompson reviews Celsius 7/7 by Michael Gove and Dying to Win by Robert A Pape.

In the days after the planes hit the Twin Towers, it wasn't difficult to spot those of our fellow countrymen who, shall we say, weren't as upset as they might have been. After a sniffle of crocodile tears, they would say: "But the West has to ask itself why the Islamic world hates it so much."

Conservatives had no difficulty interpreting this statement. It meant: "America had it coming." (Interestingly, many people who uttered it were Liberal Democrats, an early indication of that party's shameful equivocation over the war on terrorism.) Yet the question itself was a valid one, and after the London bombings the Right found itself forced to address it.

Michael Gove is a 38-year-old Conservative MP who describes himself as "a supporter of Israel, gay rights, feminism and President Bush". He is the only Tory politician who can beat the Lefty pseuds of Newsnight Review at their own game. The title of this little book, Celsius 7/7, is a typically mischievous gesture, giving the finger (as they say in the States) to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

But there is no mischief in the text, only anger and scorn. Celsius 7/7 is a ferocious philippic directed against Islamists and their Western appeasers. As listeners to The Moral Maze will be aware, Gove does not take prisoners. Despite the range of opinions implied by his self-description, his worldview is essentially Manichean.

At times, this black-and-white approach serves him well. Gove has done us all a service by uncovering the extremist antecedents of the "moderate" Muslim spokesmen feted by the race-relations industry and its sympathisers in the BBC. But the reader is less well served by his celebration of the good guys.

Not for nothing does Gove list Israel as the first of his enthusiasms. His chapter on the subject could have been dictated by that country's ministry of information. One looks in vain for any recognition that Israel's foreign policy is motivated not only by legitimate self-defence but also by vengeful (and distinctively Middle Eastern) tribal hatred.

The problem with philippics is that, by their nature, they over-simplify. Celsius 7/7 is built around the proposition that the war on terror is a war against the "totalitarian ideology" of global Islamism. This Cold War analogy works in one respect: the Left-liberal columnists and hand-wringing churchmen who suck up to militant Islam are the direct successors of those CND supporters who changed the subject every time the issue of Soviet psychiatric hospitals was raised. For the most part, however, Gove's comparison is misleading, and even dangerous.

To discover why, read Dying to Win by Robert A Pape, a political scientist who is the director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. His book is of crucial importance because the greatest threat faced by the West is posed not by the Communist-style annexation of countries by Islamists, but by suicide killers who are on the verge of acquiring chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Although Pape recognises that the terrorists are likely to be Muslims, and that there is cross-pollination between extremists, he is not convinced that Islamism is a unified global ideology. If it were unified, he says, then one would expect al-Qa'eda to have attacked Israel, or Hamas to have attacked America. He also rejects the assumption that the root cause of the epidemic of suicide bombings that began in the 1980s is fundamentalism. Many of the Palestinian fanatics who blow up innocent people in Israel are nationalists, not Islamists; they do not expect to be rewarded in the afterlife. Nor do the Tamil Tigers, atheists who hold the world record for the number of suicide attacks.

Pape has subjected a database of more than 300 suicide murderers to meticulous multivariate analysis. His conclusion is that most of them were inspired by an anti-colonialist agenda that can (but need not) be combined with religious zealotry. The real objective of al-Qa'eda terrorists, including British ones, is the "liberation" of territory from US-supported regimes. And it is this primacy of land over faith that explains why support for suicide bombings among Palestinians is far higher than support for Islamism. Most suicide bombers kill themselves because they know they will be celebrated as freedom fighters by their communities; doe-eyed virgins don't figure in their calculations.

Like Gove, Pape advocates Arab democracy as a long-term solution. The difference is that he believes any experiment will fail if it carries even the whiff of colonial imposition. Meanwhile, he advises the West to protect itself very aggressively against terror through control of its borders. To adapt a smug liberal cliché that did the rounds after September 11, we have no alternative but to wage war on an abstract noun.